Saturday, March 3, 2018

TE Connectivity (TE) introduced its zQSFP+ stacked belly-to-belly cages designed for high-density switches with 48 or 64 silicon ports. The cage supports a single printed circuit board (PCB) architecture (versus two PCBs) in each line card.

The company said this new design addresses the requirements for higher density switches, including Open Compute Project (OCP) reference designs. The cages support up to 28G NRZ and 56G PAM-4 data rates to achieve faster speeds in these high-density switches. TE's zQSFP+ stacked belly-to-belly cages are dual-sourced with Molex and are drop-in replacements.

"These new zQSFP+ cages allow us to design denser switches while reducing costs by using just one PCB per line card," said Melody Chiang, product manager at Accton. "TE continually supports our efforts to design faster, denser switches, and this belly-to-belly configuration is just the latest example."